Dumbphones: Are they better than smartphones?

[Osama Bin Laden]

I got recommended a video titled "I Am Starting To Live With Dumbphones (im not switching)", which piqued my curiosity because it was a zoomer-looking kid, and expected the based take of "you know, everybody is always on their phones and i don't like that". however, when searching through his channel, I found this.

Spoiler: Unrelated video about him coming out as a faggot

At 4:41, he indirectly admits to being groomed by people on the internet

24:39

However, this led to a question that isn't about a 15-year-old boy. Are dumbphones better than smartphones? Is there anything more based or cool about dumbphones that smartphones aren't?

TLW: Kid was on a boat with his family. They were going down a river when the boat happened to flip and everyone went underwater. According to kid, he almost drowned but got saved by "deep grass". The reason why Kid is pro-dumbphone is because they would've been more useful than a smartphone would've been.

• Ads are bad
• Kid likes living on the early 2000s internet
• Kid likes to ramble.... ALOT

 

[Waifu Denier]

I've personally been using one as my primary phone for two years now, but really it is mostly the same as when I had a smartphone because I never used social media, most phone apps, etc. I think dumbphones are good for certain people who would be too tempted on a regular smartphone and really want to cut down on mindless phone browsing, but ultimately, you can accomplish the same thing by locking down your regular smartphone and including only the most essential applications. Or just have basic self control.

 

[Spud]

The nokia brick could kill a man and could be used to call your mother to tell her you love her. What more could you want from a phone?

 

[Bkornblume]

Local tech nigga MKBHD's production company tried living with so called dumb phones to varied, but interesting results:

For my personal opinion though I feel like getting a feature phone would be the best idea, as it won't give you the feeling of "this is clearly a smartphone but it won't do smartphone things" or be so begrudgingly slow that it makes you want to go back to your regular smartphone. It will just do its job of being a phone, as in making/receiving calls, messages, and some very basic games and social media functionality.

 

[Bloitzhole]

The main functions of my phone besides necessary communication are quick lookups for facts when there's uncertainty about a topic of conversation, gps navigation and listening to audio books. I see no benefit to bringing a separate mp3 player, a tomtom and all 32 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica on top of a dumbphone everywhere I go.

 

[COME ON OUT YOU RAPIST]

There would be no need for dumbphones if people stopped tolerating all of the things that make smartphones unappealing. Good luck convincing Google or Apple to stop aggressively shilling bloat to their paying customers, though.

 

[Anti Alien Alarm]

Dumbphones as a concept are retarded. Most people only want one because they're addicted to social media and shitty phone games. You know what's easier than going out and buying a new phone? UNINSTALLING YOUR SHITTY PHONE GAMES AND SOCIAL MEDIA. Jesus Christ man...

 

[Safir]

Dumbphones are next to unusable for me, people don't take calls, and cell companies covertly set up voicemail or fake voicemail for other people's accounts, so when my call hasn't connected after like five seconds (and probably will not connect ever), I'm still getting billed for waiting. I use a dumbphone for SMS 2 factor authentication and to go outside (so family can call me). But I don't expect to be able to call anyone.

That said, I also hate data plans. I don't need a data plan every day; I'm lucky to have a plan that's billed daily and if I go into "debt", it stops billing and working. So to have the data plan working for a day, I pay off the debt and 1 day's worth of plan. Two days, the debt and 2 days' worth. It's a little dishonest on their part in that when they send me to debt, they immediately switch off data despite having billed me for the day, but I still save a lot.

 

[Dysnomia]

I still use a flip phone. It's fine. I got a free smart phone, took out the sim and use it to play games.

 

[Jeff Q. Anime]

I kinda like having instant access to the sum of humanity's knowledge and accomplishments in my pocket at any given moment tbh

 

[Spruce Supremacist]

Feature phones from the era when they were the main part of the market are good, however contemporary feature phones are absolute AIDS.

I've tried a few contemporary feature phones from Nokia and the directional pad is borderline unusable: you REALLY have to try your best not to click one of the directions by accident when pressing down on the middle part - decades of feature phone keypad evolution and now we get something that handles worse than even cheapo phones from early 00s.

Besides functionality, the design language is also a major step backwards, as companies are obviously trying to apply the minimalist smartphone design school of thought where everything looks bland, featureless ("minimalist") and is also uncomfortable because of course it has to be thin and difficult to hold firmly in your hand. And this is only regarding candy bar shaped ones - the flip phones have been neutered to a mockery of their once cool design, with buttons so huge that you really can't see it as anything else other than a "grandma phone".

TL;DR: If you're gonna go and get a feature phone, get yourself a classic refurbished Nokia/Sony Ericsson/Motorola/whatever - you'll get something that's cheaper and more solidly built than anything you'll find new today in the same form factor - both hardware and software wise.

 

[Nguyen Van Phuoc]

It's a meme in current year
The ones that are made now are all cheap Chinkshit that you could break by looking at it and half of the time they're just smartphones that run Android disguised as a clamshell
The actual good ones don't even work anymore because all of the 2G/3G networks are shut down

 

[ZMOT]

I see no benefit to bringing a separate mp3 player, a tomtom and all 32 volumes of the Encyclopædia Britannica on top of a dumbphone everywhere I go.

not making heads turn with your big bulging encyclopaedia collection, smh

The ones that are made now are all cheap Chinkshit that you could break by looking at it and half of the time they're just smartphones that run Android disguised as a clamshell
The actual good ones don't even work anymore because all of the 2G/3G networks are shut down

you could get some old ones that still work but are too slow/simple these days (till we're all forced onto 6G to properly cook our kids) and thus don't offer any potential security issues.

 

[There Is Light At The End]

Just find nokia 3310. It has colors and it's just that - a phone

 

[Celebrate Nite]

The ones that are made now are all cheap Chinkshit that you could break by looking at it

i feel like that could be said about almost anything tech related these days

 

[Staffy]

I find typing in dumbphones much better. Even right now I am annoyed with the frequent typos whenever I type on my smartphone.

 

[Grub]

I would have said yes like 5 years ago but I have no internet where I live now and for the most part it's been inconvenient to use my computer so I've been using a smartphone for a lot of the shit I used to use a computer for. Not everything obviously but it has been nice to be able to do some kind of computery shit with something that fits in my pocket. Don't get me wrong though, it sucks and I kind of hate it. I hate the direction smartphone technology went in. Locked down limited devices that hide away and lock down parts of the filesystem, OS and hardware.

But, you know as much as Google, Apple and device manufacturers are to blame nobody blames ARM enough. They way they license their chip designs is pretty much the reason why we have the hellscape that is the mobile phone world as opposed to the world of desktop computers. I still remember watching an interview with some guy from ARM a while back about some new, at the time, virtualization technology they were implementing.

He was talking about all this great shit you would be able to do with it. How you could make mobile devices that could run any operating system and shit like that. Then he laughed and said but that will never happen and then he went on talk about how it could be used to create things like locked down bootloaders and hidden locked down firmwares and shit like that and how this was all only possible because of ARM's licensing program. I think it was an interview for investors maybe or something. It was pretty depressing though and made me realize that as long as everything is powered by ARM chipsets devices are only going to get more locked down. People don't realize how lucky we got with x86-64. Before that, personal computers were about as fucked up and proprietary as consoles or smartphones. It just really fucking sucks it all ended up the way it did. Smartphones really didn't need to end up the way they did.

 

[seri0us]

I would have said yes like 5 years ago but I have no internet where I live now and for the most part it's been inconvenient to use my computer so I've been using a smartphone for a lot of the shit I used to use a computer for

You can tether Internet connection from the mobile phone to the PC

 

[Grub]

You can tether Internet connection from the mobile phone to the PC

Yeah I do that sometimes. I just meant it's physically inconvenient where I'm living to set the computer up and use it comfortably.

 

[Paper Machete]

It sucks that there is no other option for smartphones other than Apple or Android (which is full of Google now). But if you need to curb your addictions to social media or anything easily accessible by a phone there are ways to lock down smartphones to inhibit/remind yourself while keeping the other functions. There are a lot of problems with modern tech but smartphones being cheap these days is actually a good thing. You can basically use it as a computer, for music, for GPS, etc. So with one device you no longer need to pay or keep around many other items, making them actually more economical if you're smart. When traveling a lot of your entertainment is right there.

I stream/pirate everything I watch these days so when I don't have my laptop to watch something on I use my phone. Same for e-books and audiobooks.

If you're poor having a couple hundred dollar device that allows you to play basic games, watch stuff, listen to stuff, read, etc. and all for free if you know how to do it is actually very good. People just need to be aware of the fact they need to watch they don't get addicted to doom scrolling or anything else. I mostly still like to use my laptop at all because typing out anything longer than a sentence is a pain on any small device.